Being There -- a workshop in the research process behind Axolotl, an improvised performance work where the audience is blindfolded for 2 hours and invited to interact with each other and a group of actors, dancers, and musicians searching after the nature of meaning.
in this workshop, we explore

movement, touch, dance, conversation, theater, image, sound

the investigation of self and of interconnection

improvising the daily with more meaning

improvising theater and dance with more sense of relevance

The blindfolded audience of Axolotl is invited into a space of permission to explore themselves and interaction with each other. What rules are released? What new rules are created? The performers work in a very open way with the question of what is meaningful experience, how do we find it, deepen it, provoke it. In this performance, it is not that we hope to answer the question, but that we believe that holding the question leads to interesting places.

What if we approach meaning directly?

What if we approach it indirectly?

For the dancer or actor, interesting questions come up around the nature of performing the body. From these questions, we come up with an idea that you might call “Performing Touch”, where performed dance has as much to do with the audience’s body and movement as the performer’s and where the act of performing, always acknowledged to be interactive, is in this context unavoidably and intrinsically so.

Looking at the idea of “performing” as acting in the world with a greater sense of presence and possibility and with a sense of our interconnection with the other, we look at these skills we call performing skills as possibilities for enriching our daily lives and interactions.

The workshop will be a series of explorations, with and without blindfolds, looking at, challenging, and investigating what we want, what we find meaningful. Reference points include, but not limited to contact improvisation, authentic movement, dreambody work, exercises from the experimental theater, and the art of conversation. The process aims to deepen creative process, personal investigation, and performance work, as well as to make life just a bit more interesting…

No previous performance experience required… just a strong desire to investigate the self and interconnection